Chapter 13
I had heard people describe grief in lots of different ways before.
It hadn’t been something I’d thought much about except feeling empathy for anyone going through loss.
But always with as much distance as I could manage; to keep their pain from tainting me too.
Maybe that was why I was so unprepared, staring into the large dark hole as I watched his coffin lowered in.
When I got the call four days ago that there had been an accident, all I’d felt was panic so intense it brought spots to my eyes and made my head spin to the point of fainting.
But when they said there was nothing they could do and it was all over.
.. I felt like I was the one that was dead.
I wished I was. Instead of moving amongst the living like a spectre, not really there, not really anything at all.
That was until we brought his body home and I saw my Mam disintegrate.
The extremities of my family’s pain were the only thing that could pull me from my numbness.
I wanted to run away and hide from the depth of their agony, but it was familiar and it called to my own.
All I wanted in that moment was to protect them.
To try and shield them all from a life without him, because what was the point of a life without him?
Who even were we as a family if we weren’t the five of us?
And how could any being in this universe be so cruel as to tear us apart, to break my mother to the point she didn’t even look human anymore?
Even now, as she stood beside me, a part of me was scared she’d jump right into that hole after my brother’s coffin to be with him again.
She had held it together the entire time we turned off his life support machine, but as soon as his body was taken away, it was like a switch flicked inside her.
And it made terror course through my body how monotone and disengaged she was.
Sorcha had disappeared shortly after the life support was turned off and we couldn’t reach her during any of the funeral preparations.
I envied her the choice to run away and hide.
As I sat through the wake holding my family’s hands for hours upon hours of sympathisers, I heard so much of the same comfort doled out again and again.
“God called his angel back, he’s with his nana now, he’ll always be with ye,” and other utter horseshit that made me want to claw my skin from my body. My personal favourite was every other person commenting, “God he looks great.”
No, Nora, you crazy old bat - he looks fucking dead. Fuck God. And fuck the angels and fuck nana too. Fuck anyone in any world that had my brother when I didn’t.
As if losing someone as integral to your existence as your own limbs wasn’t hard enough, we then had to sit through the spectacle of the Irish funeral.
I used to think how nice it was that we came together in times of need as a community, with such outpourings of love and support to help the bereaved through the hardest time.
But that was before I was the bereaved. And I was the one on the receiving end of all the love.
Sitting beside my brother’s body in our sitting room for six hours straight, while everyone who’d ever known any of my relatives came to shake my hand and pay their respects.
All while a window was kept open in the sitting room he was laid out in, to allow Shea’s soul to escape to heaven.
Hours and hours of people being there to support us, hurting from the loss of my brother or showing face as was necessary.
But I’d been on that end, the whole time in the back of your mind you were thinking, “Those poor fuckers, don’t ever let it be me. ”
And now it was me. And after the wake yesterday we still weren’t done.
We’d survived the service and my Uncle Murty’s eulogy because no one else could summon the strength to get through it.
Now we just had to get through this final goodbye before we walked away and left my beautiful, strong, amazing brother in the cold ground to rot.
I could feel the hysteria start to claw at my throat, my breaths coming shorter as I struggled to inhale and my heart pounded.
My eyes burned from the tears fighting to break free and I was about to vomit my heart from my chest. That’s when I felt the shake in Mam’s hand that was clutching mine, with Dad on her other side.
She looked so dead inside that it was strange to feel any movement at all from her - a walking corpse - and I could hear my Dad’s wracking sobs as he clung to her.
I swallowed down every emotion coursing through my body and disassociated completely from my pain.
Christ knew it’d be right there waiting to embrace me when I was alone, but right now my family needed me.
My arm was wrapped around Fionn as he shook against my side through his silent tears.
I pulled him and Mam in closer to me and leaned us towards Dad.
“We’re going to be okay, it’s almost over.
We’ve got this, okay fam?” My brother and Dad looked at me with stiff nods, while Mam didn’t move except to squeeze my hand to the point of pain.
Her eyes never left the coffin as it reached the bottom.
I steeled my spine and blinked the tears out of my eyes to follow its descent too.
My family needed me, and I needed to pull myself together and block it all out until tomorrow came, to bring an even worse day than today. A quiet reality that he was gone with nothing to distract us.
I walked the path from the graveyard with my head swivelling to find the people I needed most right now.
Just before the gates I spotted Niamh, Ella, Sara, and Sinéad - all grouped together with sad smiles on their faces.
They’d been at the house with me almost non-stop since we’d gotten home from the hospital, and I was so grateful to have friends I could always count on in my corner, just holding me or making me laugh when I thought I’d never make that sound again.
Niamh linked arms with me as we patiently waited to get past the bottleneck at the gates and head to the pub down the road.
“You holding up okay, girl?” Ella asked softly as she leaned in on my other side. I shrugged and gave her a genuine smile.
“I’ve no choice but to hold it together, at least for today anyway.
” She nodded understandingly and kept her gaze on me like she was about to say something else.
I started scanning the crowd to see where my family had gone to and if Nana Ita, Dad’s Mam, was being looked after by my uncle Murt.
I heard “Not now,” hissed from Sara to Ella and I turned to face them again as Ella gave her a pointed look, “Better we tell her than she’s blindsided. ”
“What now?” I asked with a serious dose of trepidation.
At that point I wasn’t sure anything could have happened I’d remotely care about; I’d just put one of my favourite people in the world into the ground, and I felt so disconnected from myself it was like I’d just watched the events unfold out of my own body.
“They’re here,” she said, with a serious expression while the girls all looked sombrely at me.
“Who’s here?” I blinked, not having an iota who she was talking about.
“Sex God and Professor Ride have both appeared to show their respects today love,” Niamh answered.
I blinked as I realised who she meant - Connor and Ronan.
.. both here in Clon. This was not a curveball I was expecting.
I thought Connor was gone back to base and Ronan must have been scanning RIP.ie to get the details to show up today.
Given the exceptionally convoluted love triangle I’d found myself in over the past few months, it wasn’t exactly great news.
But having said that, my world had just fallen apart, so a larger part of me really couldn’t have cared less.
“Well at least there’ll be a bit of eye candy amongst all the sad faces at the pub,” I shrugged.
Ella beamed at me. “That’s my girl, I knew you’d take it in your st—arrrgggghhh.
” I spun around just in time to watch her stumble straight over the kerb of the closest grave and land face first in the very freshly dug soil piled on top of Mr Brannigan at his funeral four days ago.
The place erupted in laughter as she pulled her muddy face out of the pile to look at us, and the look of utter horror on her face set me off, until I felt like I couldn’t breathe from laughing.
I even spotted Dad belly laughing behind the gates, watching my childhood best friend pull herself out of a grave the day we buried my brother.
Her dependable idiocy was exactly what I needed to make my heart feel just a little warmer - even if it was just for a minute.
By the time we strolled down to the pub, Ella was still smarting over the humiliation of having the whole congregation laughing at her, while my cousin Tessa regaled me of her experience at the wake last night.
It involved Uncle Murty choking all the extended family with his noxious gas after ignoring the warning to stay away from sandwiches with lettuce.
His reputation had always preceded him at family events, and no one ever wanted to be near him if he’d consumed greens.
“So, Aunty Carol had her head out the window for a good two hours while she shouted what a repulsive bastard he is.” I laughed along with her, thinking of all the stupid things that had happened over the past two days that had caused laughter.
While the ordeal of the wake had been tough, with hours and hours of sympathisers and callers, there was no denying the sense of community that came off the back of a tragedy like ours.